Giving vehicles for philanthropists who want to engage and fund in science and medicine are expanding, and less philanthropists and corporations are following the traditional ‘foundation’ model of grantmaking. In its place we see an increase in the venture philanthropy model directed by individuals who employ organizations with grantmaking and science/medicine backgrounds to strategically run grant programs for them for maximum impact. The Milken Institute Center for Strategic Philanthropy (CSP) advises philanthropists and foundations seeking to develop and implement transformative giving strategies. In the past ten years alone, CSP has advised over $2 billion in funding on behalf of philanthropists and that number continues to grow. This session will cover two important areas. First, CSP staff/program directors will give an overview of CSP, their strategic goals with philanthropists, and the breadth of depth of their work. Second, the panel will explore this model of venture philanthropy, how organizations like CSP and academia can successfully work together on impactful communication to philanthropists, and how CFR professionals play a role in this model.

Since 2020, there has been renewed and growing interest in considering reparations to ameliorate past wrongs and avoid future harms against Black people. Many think about reparations narrowly – as cash payments that would only benefit Black people. Liberation Ventures is a field-building organization committed to thinking about reparations as part of a comprehensive process of racial repair: a project that requires economic, cultural, and political transformation. Racial repair work benefits not just Black people, but all people, catalyzing a true multiracial democracy. The Black Reparations Project at Mills College has been thinking about and exploring many opportunities within higher education to take up the critical work of racial repair. Universities, especially historically white universities, must reckon with their past and current policies to build a Culture of Repair internally. Colleges and universities are uniquely positioned–given their significant financial resources, research capacity, and historical connections to slavery–to take on the deep work of racial repair for the harm they have exacted on Black Americans. Moreover, they can leverage their research capacity and the experience of their staff to directly support local reparations and truth-telling efforts in their communities. Join this fireside chat with Dr. Ashley Adams, Dr. Erika Weissinger, Ife Tayo Walker, and Vikas Maturi to learn more about Liberation Ventures’ living framework for racial repair, how the Black Reparations Project is undertaking this work on a college campus, and how to start similar conversations on your campus.

Your institution likely has many amazing faculty, staff, and impactful programs with a spectrum of fundraising experience. In this session, you will learn to harness these talents and empower your campus partners to think beyond budget deficit fundraising to develop an exciting philanthropic vision. You will build skills to coach campus partners to work with corporate and foundation funders toward co-creating fundable projects and learn how to identify ideas with potential and build innovative concepts.

Donor advised funds are the fastest growing vehicle in fundraising - accounting for nearly $48 billion (10% of all giving) in one recent year. In the CFR universe, these intermediary funds and the ease with which we manage them can make an incredible difference in the bottom line of nonprofit support for faculty work. And yet, donor advised funds challenge all of us in fundraising - it can be difficult to understand how DAF entities interact with their donors, and how those donors interact with us via their DAFs. But in the Foundation Relations space, they are particularly challenging. Sometimes it is even hard to figure out how to manage them in the right place - are they unrestricted gifts? or are they sponsored projects? What happens when our internal systems and the donor desires don't match? The conversations across divisions within a university can be interesting and challenging. At Michigan, we worked through a challenging internal MOU process between Development and Research to describe the reasons for accepting as gift and managing as sponsored on a recent DAF award. But DAFs will also complicate our reporting out on numbers: the VSE survey tool may recommend that development shops report DAFs as separate entities from either Corp, Foundation or Other Org revenue. And current standards for reporting call a private company's DAF (ie, Schwab) an other org (nonprofit), but a Community Foundation's DAFs are professional foundations. It's confusing!! This panel will engage both a nonprofit and a commercial DAF manager, and two university CFR leaders, to talk about why the donors are using the DAFs and what their rules are about gifts and sponsored projects -And what our role is as CFR officers to prepare our campus for this complex funding mechanism.

Schmidt Futures is a relatively young philanthropic initiative, launched in 2017 by Eric and Wendy Schmidt. It brings talented people together in networks to prove out their ideas and solve hard challenges. Tom Kalil has served as Chief Innovation Officer since the beginning, leading efforts to identify promising “moonshot” initiatives for public good that leverage technology to solve societal problems and advance science. In 2021, Schmidt Futures launched a Task Force on Synthetic Biology and the Bioeconomy, whose goal is to optimize the development of an emerging bioeconomy, with a value projected between $4 trillion and $30 trillion. In 2022, the organization launched a $148 million initiative designed to accelerate the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in postdoctoral research, initially partnering with nine universities to support 160 postdoctoral fellows. Schmidt Futures also supports AI2050, a collaborative and multidisciplinary effort to maximize the benefits and minimize the harms that could come from new technologies associated with AI. In March 2023, Schmidt Futures and Citadel CEO Ken Griffin announced a $50 million commitment to launch new Focused Research Organizations (FROs) to cure complex diseases. This commitment augments previous investments in Convergent Research, an initiative designed to make strategic investments in time-limited initiatives to pursue scientific moonshots. These and other commitments reflect a fresh way of thinking about philanthropy and the role of foundations in launching and sustaining innovative endeavors.

This panel conversation with our peers in CFR will talk about how they approached benchmarking, what they used it to accomplish, and what they'd do differently if they had it to do over. Panelists will also talk about the challenges of apples-to-apples comparisons, whether they be on FTEs or dollars in the door or gifts/grants from sources that don't disclose via tax returns. Panelists include Los Angeles's Mount Saint Mary's University, which has done benchmarking for institutional giving; U Michigan, which did a benchmarking with UM's research operations as well as development; and University of Washington, which has used varied approaches. Together, we will explore multiple ways of benchmarking, from informal calls for feedback among peers, to email surveys, to full-on data and interview-driven practices.

How can we help faculty grant writers in an increasingly competitive landscape? Faculty report that they find the process of grant applications intimidating and desire more robust support. To address this need at the University of Rhode Island (URI), the associate director of Corporate and Foundation Relations and the director of Writing Across URI collaborated on the design of an online grant writing course which provides step-by-step guidance. In this session they share their process in creating this on-demand tool, and discuss how cross-campus innovations can build an institutional culture of grant writing and streamline resources available to faculty.

Some philanthropic foundations can require a lot of time and attention from CFR officers, faculty, and institutional leaders. Foundations with high expectations and detailed requirements can be challenging—and they can also be our greatest allies! This session, facilitated by two foundation relations officers with decades of experience managing successful relationships with high-touch foundations, will discuss approaches to building and maintaining positive, fruitful partnerships with important, yet demanding, funders. No names of foundations or recognizable attributes will be revealed during this lively, interactive skills-building session.

Since 1977, the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation has been a major force in science philanthropy. In its earliest years, the Beckman Foundation established a number of centers and institutes at colleges, including the Beckman Institutes at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and California Institute of Technology. In 1990, Dr. Beckman decided that the foundation should exist in perpetuity, and that it would be devoted to support young researchers to pursue innovative and high-risk research projects. To this day, the Beckman Foundation is dedicated to young scientists, directing its philanthropic work through national programs directed at science education and research in higher education and local grants funding educational initiatives in and around Orange County, California. Since its inception in 1978, the Beckman Foundation has exceeded $830 million in grants supporting scientific research through these various programs. Dr. Anne Hultgren has served as CEO of the Beckman Foundation since 2015, leading the organization through a period of many changes at the foundation and in the world. Through its Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion initiative, the Beckman Foundation is devoted to broadening its outreach to schools and institutions that have not previously applied for funding or have not been selected even as it remains devoted to its founding principle of supporting early-career faculty who, as Arnold Beckman put it, “don’t yet have the clout to receive the large Federal grants.” Join Dr. Hultgren for an important discussion of the role of science philanthropy in advancing careers and in advancing discoveries.